Announcing the World Register of Marine Species Collection

The ocean teems with millions of plants, animals and other organisms, and keeping track of this vast inventory can be quite a laborious task. Since its launch in 2008 as an affiliated project with the Census of Marine Life, the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) has been working to consolidate taxonomic information from over a hundred databases to provide an open-access, comprehensive inventory of names and descriptions of all marine organisms.

Today we are pleased to announce the launch of the PLOS ONE WoRMS Collection, comprising of 14 species reviews from this long-term project.

The WoRMS database contains species names, synonyms, sources and a range of other information, as described in the collection overview. The reviews included in the WoRMS collection discuss some of the species represented by the database, such as sea squirts, brittle stars, lace corals, crustaceans, reptiles and more, and highlight the diversity across the globe of just some of the many species within the register.

This collection aims to join PLOS ONE’s quest for open-access data content and the WoRMS’s pursuit of recording and continuously updating an entire database of the world’s marine species for this purpose.